Monday, January 9th, 2017

A wonderfully thoughtful piece from Robin, ranging from the printing technologies of the 15th century right up to the latest web technologies. It’s got all my favourite things in there: typography, digital preservation, and service workers. Marvellous!

Friday, December 16th, 2016

I really wanted to make sure that the print styles for Resilient Web Design were pretty good—or at least as good as they could be given the everlasting lack of support for many print properties in browsers.

That sets the margins of printed pages in inches (I could’ve used centimetres but the numbers were nice and round in inches). The orphans: 4 declaration says that if there’s less than 4 lines on a page, shunt the text onto the next page. And widows: 3 declares that there shouldn’t be less than 3 lines left alone on a page (instead more lines will be carried over from the previous page).

I always get widows and orphans confused so I remind myself that orphans are left alone at the start; widows are left alone at the end.

I try to make sure that some elements don’t get their content split up over page breaks:

I don’t want headings appearing at the end of a page with no content after them:

@media print {
h1,h2,h3,h4,h5 {
page-break-after: avoid;
}
}

But sections should always start with a fresh page:

@media print {
section {
page-break-before: always;
}
}

There are a few other little tweaks to hide some content from printing, but that’s pretty much it. Using print preview in browsers showed some pretty decent formatting. In fact, I used the “Save as PDF” option to create the PDF versions of the book. The portrait version comes from Chrome’s preview. The landscape version comes from Firefox, which offers more options under “Layout”.

Something interesting happens when the cost of tooling-up falls. There comes a point where your production runs are small enough that the economies of scale that justify container ships from China stop working.

3D Printing is unlikely to prove as satisfying to manual labor evangelists as an afternoon spent with a monkey wrench. But by bringing more and more people into the innovation process, 3D printers could usher in a new generation of builders and designers and tinkerers, just as Legos and erector sets turned previous generations into amateur engineers and architects.

Every 3D printer should seamlessly integrate a 3D scanner, even if it makes the device cost much more. The reason is simple: If you set the expectation that every device can both input and output 3D objects, you provide the necessary fundamentals for network effects to take off amongst creators. But no, these devices are not “3D fax machines”. What you’ve actually made, when you have an internet-connected device that can both send and receive 3D-printed objects, is a teleporter.

But my favourite piece of speculation on where this technology could take us comes from Russell Davies. He gave an excellent talk as part of the BBC’s Four Thought series in which he talks not so much about The Internet Of Things, but The Geocities Of Things. I like that.